From a Local to a Global Perspective in Crime Writing: on Massimo Carlotto, Impegno, and Respiro Corto

From a Local to a Global Perspective in Crime Writing: On Massimo Carlotto, IMPEGNO, and RESPIRO CORTO Enrichetta Lucilla Frezzato Summary: Having conducted a thorough analysis of the social and economic environment of the Northeast of Italy and having exposed a scenario of widespread illegality and culpable collusion in his Alligatore series and noir novels, Massimo Carlotto concluded a narrative cycle by enlarging his object of analysis to a wider geographical area. This process culminates inRespiro corto (2012), which traces the most recent phases of the evolution of internationally organized crime marking the inextricability of the local and global dimensions in contemporary society. When placed within the context of the superimposing traditions of impegno and Italian crime writing, the presence of this component turns out to be particularly interesting insofar as its persistence introduces an innovative approach to both traditions. Making his appearance on the Italian literary scene in 1995, Massimo Carlotto (b. 1956) quickly established himself as one of the most prominent writers of crime fiction in Italy and abroad. His books have been translated into many different languages, including English. Since his literary debut, he has woven his writing around the portrayal of social, political, and economic issues afflicting a range of specific geographical contexts. His drive to explore the “grey area” of the interaction between legality and the criminal underworld led Carlotto to choose crime writing as the most suitable tool for investigating the realities he depicts in his novels. As the author’s interest was drawn to the mechanisms ruling the interconnections between legal and illegal activities, the transformation of the modes of criminality in the contemporary world has surfaced as a predominant theme throughout Carlotto’s production. Originating from the need to recount Quaderni d’italianistica, Vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, 107–124 Enrichetta Lucilla Frezzato his own vicissitudes as a fugitive,1 the author’s writing career soon took the path of an analysis of the current social and criminal state of a specific area, that of the Northeast of Italy, subsequently developing into a wider perspective that incor- porates, on the one hand, an in-depth consideration of the relationship between the self and criminal behaviour and, on the other, a precise examination of the structural transformations that the criminal world has undergone as a result of globalization. The latter has meant that over time, the span of Carlotto’s inquiries has stretched beyond the boundaries of his original interest in a specific region and progressively expanded to include, at an initial stage, issues that affect the Italian nation as a whole and, subsequently, international dynamics ranging across countries all over Europe and the rest of the world, a process that culminated with the publication of Respiro corto in 2012 (currently unavailable in the English language). As can be inferred even from this brief outline, the element of territory is crucial in Carlotto’s work in two ways: on the one hand, the specific socio-economic dynamics of a defined territory inspire the author’s need to reflect on it through his novels; on the other hand, far from serving as mere background, the specific territory in which each novel is set becomes the real object of the author’s investigation. The analysis presented here aims to explore the development of the trajectory followed by Carlotto’s work from a regional to a global perspective, first by determining its rootedness in the literary traditions of impegno and crime writing in Italy and subsequently by demonstrating the significance of the element of territory in the author’s work and by analyzing Respiro corto. Impegno and crime writing: two traditions fused The Italian traditions of socially and politically committed writing known asim - pegno and of crime writing are the two main points of reference defining the background against which Carlotto’s work is situated. At this stage, it will be beneficial to consider how these two traditions interlace as this will help place Carlotto on the map of contemporary literature in the country. The idea of impegno is firmly established at the core of a literary tradition within the contemporary Italian context, its roots dating back to the social and 1 Carlotto was at the centre of one of the most discussed judicial cases in recent Italian history, beginning with a murder accusation in 1976. He has always claimed his innocence. After many trials, he fled to Paris and South America before being granted a presidential pardon in 1993. — 108 — From a Local to a Global Perspective in Crime Writing political environment dominating the years following the end of World War II. Centred around the key figures of Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the early debate on impegno revolved around—and eventually chal- lenged—an idea of literature as essentially and structurally a politically committed art, at whose core was Gramsci’s conception of the “organic intellectual” as an ideological guide, aligned with the positions of the Communist Party.2 For a long period of time, politically engaged intellectuals, and therefore impegno in literature, were mainly associated with the ideology of the Communist Party, and it was a common assumption that, subsequent to this early stage, the phase of ex- perimentation that came about with the neoavanguardia in the 1960s and 1970s, while still strongly influenced by Marxist thought, overshadowed the practice and silenced the voice of impegno in Italian literature. However, more recent studies have convincingly argued that social and political commitment in Italian literature was instead channelled into different forms, reshaping itself during the 1980s and 1990s. As Jennifer Burns explains, during these years, impegno was reshaped into a form of “fragmented” interest directed by authors towards a diverse range of specific issues, and no longer backed by an overarching political agenda as had instead happened during the first two decades following the end of the war (2001). The same position is maintained by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug, who in their Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture take a stance against the assumption that the postmodernist phase, with its piecemeal nature and its dismissal of universalism, should naturally signify the demise of all kinds of political commitment in literature, or of the idea of impegno in contemporary Italian literature. On the contrary, as the title of their volume im- plies, “there is more than one way of describing impegno in postmodernist terms” (3). What makes this perspective particularly relevant to the present discussion is that it highlights how the tradition of impegno and that of crime writing begin to intertwine at this point. As will become clear in the following paragraphs, with the “new” wave of crime writing in the 1990s, the genre indeed became a vehicle for voicing impegno.3 2 Gramsci reflects on the role of intellectuals inQuaderni del carcere (1948–1951, partly translated as Selections from the Prison Notebooks in 1971). In 1946, the debate culminated in the well-known controversy in the pages of Il Politecnico between Palmiro Togliatti—then secretary of the Italian Communist Party— and Vittorini, who claimed writers’ autonomy from the Party. 3 It is also interesting to consider how this new wave of crime fiction, while drawing on a tradition of socially and politically engaged crime writing, participates in the contemporary resurfacing of an urge for — 109 — Enrichetta Lucilla Frezzato An imported genre in Italian culture, crime writing began to proliferate in the country in 1929 with the introduction of Mondadori’s collection “I libri gialli,” a term that was soon to be commonly applied as a general label for the whole genre. Initially frowned upon as a minor, escapist genre4 and subjected to censorship during the years of the Fascist regime, crime writing eventually gained critical recognition after authors such as Giorgio Scerbanenco, as well as established writers such as Carlo Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia started employing it. In these authors’ works, the structure of the genre and the criminal plot are fused with a cross-section of the surrounding environment and society (Milan in the 1960s for Scerbanenco and Rome in the early years of Fascism for Gadda) or intentionally employed as an instrument to portray a problematic state of affairs and the collusion of the Mafia system with the state (in Sciascia’s Sicily). As has been noted in many studies that focus on the social function of crime writing in Italian literature (Cannon; Pezzotti [Politics]; Pieri [Italian Crime Fiction]; Sangiorgi and Telò), besides marking the critical acceptance of crime writing as a literary genre, this stage also represents a turning point in the development of the Italian giallo. It was indeed during the 1960s, especially with the publication of Il giorno della civetta in 1961 (translated as Mafia Vendetta in 1963 and then as The Day of the Owl in 1984), that the rules and traditional structure of crime writing first started to be subverted, the genre developing into a tool with which to analyze and denounce the dysfunctions and corruption of institutions and politics in Italian society. As Nicoletta Di Ciolla notes, authors such as Sciascia and Gadda “produced novels in which the mystery element became an instrument

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